SC4 tone deaf with parking lot plan

We’re usually skeptical of there’s-no-parking complaints but can’t figure out how it is not going to be an issue for the Harrington Hotel. Seventy hotel rooms mean 70 cars for guests and probably a similar number for staff. With about 30 spaces on the hotel property and another dozen or so diagonal spaces planned for Fourth Street, Jeff Katofsky will need to be creative to accommodate his guests.

On the other side of the complaint, we also can’t figure out why St. Clair County Community College needs to pave more of its campus for parking. The college last week started scraping away the just about the last patch of grass on campus to create 97 additional parking spaces. The new lot will be east of the existing lot and will fill most of the space along Erie Street between the college welcome center and the Fine Arts Building.

The parking lot construction will cost $265,000.

And the college all but says it does not need it. Enrollment at SC4 has been stagnant the past several years. But the college says the parking isn’t needed for students; it is needed for the throngs of community members the college hopes to attract to campus events.

We have trouble calculating how free concerts are going to fill parking spaces more effectively than students attending classes. The college’s existing lots are rarely full. They — like other downtown “parking problems” — have some spaces that are better than others, and the Erie Street pavement will be closer to more classrooms than are many of the far-flung spaces nearer Glenwood Avenue.

A second explanation, that lots are congested because students all want to take classes at the same time, is bizarre. Who schedules the classes? Maybe we’re showing our age, but didn’t we choose our courses because the degree requirements and not because they allowed us to sleep late?

More asphalt will not make the campus more attractive. It’s ironic that the city of Port Huron vacated the west end of McMorran Boulevard so that the college could create an attractive, green “front yard” a few years ago. Now the street is a green space and the rest of the campus is getting paved over. We look forward to more criticism of “bio-swale” landscaping in the new parking lot.

It is also ironic that the parking lot project was not the college’s only news this month.

SC4 will have two tax requests on the Aug. 7 ballot. One is a .04591 mill renewal of a tax that has been levied in the community college district since 1999. The second is a new tax, 0.5 mills that would be levied for four years. The college says the taxes are needed to build and maintain infrastructure.